The Speech Functions of Reality: 3 Cosmic Dialogue

If we treat the four speech functions — offer, command, statement, and question — not as linguistic categories but as orientations of potential, then reality itself unfolds as interpersonal architecture.

The cosmos does not merely evolve; it converses.

Its evolution is not a sequence of physical events but a vast, reflexive dialogue in which inclination and probability negotiate the unfolding of being and meaning.

1. The Offer: Ontic Inclination

At the base of the ontological cline, the cosmos is always offering itself — an inclination toward relation, a readiness-to-be. This is potential’s primal gesture: not yet demanding or asserting, but inviting co-actualisation.

Every new configuration of reality arises as an offer of alignment, awaiting uptake by other potentials.

2. The Command: Ontic Fixation

Where offers harden into necessity, the inclination closes upon itself. Commands are the condensed offers of being — readiness converted into requirement.

This is how physicists come to describe “laws”: they are fossilised offers, once fluid inclinations that have become self-fixing constraints.

The cosmos obeys only itself, but the obedience is reflexive: inclination disciplined by its own history of success.

3. The Statement: Epistemic Fixation

On the epistemic side, a statement arises when construal stabilises around one configuration of knowing. The field of probability — once distributed among alternatives — has settled its meaning.

In this sense, every stable construal, every theory or perception, is a statement of the cosmos about itself.

To construe is to assert: to draw a boundary that reality itself will test.

4. The Question: Epistemic Inclination

And yet every statement gives rise to its shadow — the question. For as soon as one construal stabilises, readiness reappears as curiosity: the inclination to reconstrue.

Questions are probabilistic offers, the epistemic counterpart of ontic inclination. They re-open the field, re-animate readiness, and keep the dialogue alive.

Together, these four functions form a metafunctional symmetry within the relational ontology:

• ontic inclination ↔ offer

• ontic fixation ↔ command

• epistemic inclination ↔ question

• epistemic fixation ↔ statement

Through their interplay, reality sustains its own communicative metabolism. Inclinations invite, fixations stabilise, questions renew, and statements consolidate.

What we call the laws of physics and observations of experience are simply two halves of this greater dialogue: the cosmos commanding and declaring itself into coherence.

Meaning is not overlaid upon being; it is being speaking.